At the end of 2016, Cardinal Health transitioned its travel program from procurement to global security as the travel department shifted its focus to encompass not only cost savings but also traveler experience and safety. The move proved to be a smart one. In its first years, the department saved 20 percent on costs, travelers took compliance more seriously, and the travel team developed a closer relationship with Cardinal's security department, said Cardinal global travel manager Jill Huffman.
Encouraged by those results, the global health care services and products company in January 2018 decided to do the same with its strategic meetings program, which had been housed under communications. An added impetus was the desire to more successfully centralize the global meetings program. A year-and-a-half in, meetings' move to security is considered a success. Meetings program compliance has improved from 28 percent in 2017 to 42 percent by the end of 2018—and Cardinal global manager of meetings and events Shannon Sprau expects it to be even higher when the next measure comes in, based on the increasing number of international meetings now coming through her centralized channel.
"For us, the challenge was getting [meetings outside the U.S. and Canada] into the program," Sprau said. "Because we are now getting more opportunities to get in front of global partners, we're seeing a lot of growth in the global program month over month in terms of requests coming in. And while 42 percent sounds low, industrywide, especially for a company as large and global as Cardinal Health, that's really pretty good, though it's still lower than we would like."
Synergy
Cardinal's Meetings Compliance Drivers
Cardinal Health global manager of meetings and events Shannon Sprau promotes the following benefits of a meetings program to drive compliance with centralized policies, processes and preferred suppliers
- Leverage Cardinal Health's full travel and meetings spend with a brand/venue.
- Mitigate risk by using company contracts and addendums.
- Direct payment to the venue via a meetings card program.
- Partner with the meetings technology team.
- Access centralized year-over-year program data for easy reference.
- Increase bandwidth for the meeting owner to focus on meeting quality rather than logistics and contracts.
When the benefits alone aren't enough to drive compliance, she said, being located under "the security umbrella has helped us to enforce [policy]." The meetings team moved under the security department in 2018.
The two major motivations for moving meetings under global security were to align the meetings program with corporate functions that had similar global structures and initiatives and to house meetings and travel under one director in order to leverage the overlap. "Now that we're all under this global security umbrella, it helps us partner with [travel] better to make sure our processes are aligned," Sprau said. "The travel team is responsible for everything transient but nothing meetings related. We can now say, ‘Here's a concern you're having. Here's a concern we're having. Is there an opportunity for us to partner together, especially when we go out and educate the business on certain things?'" The result is that meetings communications to the company often have travel components, and travel communications often have meetings components. Meetings onboarding webinars for internal clients, for example, often also include an overview of the travel program.
Another obvious advantage is leveraging travel and meetings spend with suppliers to optimize savings and discounts. Each department has its own category manager in procurement, and they talk to each other "so we go down the same goals and same paths," Huffman said. "If we can collaborate and make sure we are getting the best solution for a request for proposal, that is the best for Cardinal Health, globally."
Additionally, travel often already has implemented its program in the countries that meetings are going into, "and we have a lot of contacts and relationships that we can transfer over to them," Huffman said. Plus, "what happens if we have an incident at a meeting, at a hotel? It's good for travel to also know about the incident, because we all need to be connected to ensure the safety of our travelers in every country."
The teams also compared their partners and realized that travel had a vendor that was doing a little work for the meetings department, and the meetings group had a vendor that was doing a little work for the travel department. They decided to consolidate each program under its own primary partner, an agency for the travel team and a travel and meetings management company for the meetings team, thus eliminating the secondary vendor for each department. Because each team also had experience with the other's new vendor, they then sat down to help each other make sure there were no gaps in standard operating procedures for either team.
The teams' software systems are not integrated yet, and a lot of reconciling is still manual. But meetings, travel and security do share data via monthly reports. The security team receives a list of meetings, including the hotels that have been contracted and the general number of participants. Meanwhile, travel can see that, for example, 30 people are booked at the same hotel around the same dates and deduce that a meeting is scheduled. "We can [work] with their data and follow up on our end to help with the [meetings program] compliance piece," Sprau added.
Bargaining Power
Securing Cardinal's Travel Program
Getting Cardinal Health's travel and meetings departments together under the strong umbrella of the security team has paid dividends for the company, but the travel department has seen its own upsides.
- Global travel manager Jill Huffman doubled her team from two to four: herself and one for North and South America, one for EMEA and one for Asia/Pacific.
- Cardinal consolidated to a single global travel management company.
- Security weighs in on high-risk travel requests and vets partners in high-risk areas. Not only does the security department track changes in risk status, but it also communicates with the travel team to block travel to certain locations if necessary. "It makes it easier and quicker for us to respond with security so we can see who is already headed in that direction and if we need to reschedule their plans," Huffman explained.
- The travel department's alignment with security and move to a single, global, centralized agency also has cleaned up risk and incident information coming from Cardinal's data. "There were a lot of agencies around the world, and some were not feeding at all into our security systems," Huffman said. Now, with one centralized agency and the monthly audit, "we can make sure everyone is accounted for."
- Cardinal has switched from a managed policy to a mandated policy. This has increased hotel compliance, which Huffman pegged at 98 percent for the company's global headquarters. Globally, compliance to the company's preferred hotel program sits around 80 percent.
- Since moving under security, travel program costs dropped by 20 percent from 2017 to 2018. "We have implemented air and hotel price assurance tools that [travelers] won't have access to if they don't book in our system," she said. "So when they do follow booking processes, we get an even higher cost savings."
- Traveler experience demands greater focus from the company, and the travel team put a survey feature in the mobile travel app, so it gets feedback on each trip. "It's been helpful to understand when we need to pull out of a hotel or add more because they've been selling out," Huffman said. Travelers have a separate mobile app that provides knowledge of risks and safety alerts to their destinations and allows travelers in risk situations to communicate directly with security.
When the meetings department moved to security, it consolidated the U.S./Canada meetings team and the global meetings team under Sprau. The former global meetings head moved into another position, and Sprau created a new role to lead the meetings outside the U.S. and Canada. "Prior leadership had not necessarily structured our global programs in a way that they were ultimately going to be successful," she said. Communication was part of the problem. There hadn't been as much global outreach and education about the centralized meetings program in regions outside the U.S. and Canada. In a fresh set a hands, all regions are now monitored for compliance and operations excellence. Sprau's team consistently educates regional stakeholders and addresses their program concerns. That person and Sprau grow the meetings programs in each region, working with internal clients to make sure they understand their region's meetings programs and that the programs work for the company. Then Cardinal's third-party travel and meetings management company handes sourcing and logistics.
Sprau's department handled 437 meetings in the U.S. and Canada in 2018 and 249 in the more than 65 other countries where Cardinal holds meetings, from a 10-person board meeting to a customer-facing event for nearly 9,000. Those 686 meetings represent the 42 percent compliance of all the meetings that Cardinal contracts, which tells Sprau there's still a big opportunity to bring volume in. Still, she's realized cost savings and stronger negotiation power thanks to deeper visibility into meetings spend and opportunities with the travel department. "There's been some pretty big disruption in the industry, especially around commissions," Sprau said, "and we've been able to leverage our spend with various brands to say, ‘I appreciate where you are coming from, Hotel A or Brand A, but let's look not at what this one administrative assistant who sits in this town spends with you locally but rather what Cardinal Health is spending with your brand globally.'"
Sprau added that hotel brands have helped drive compliance to the meetings program. The hotels see the value of Cardinal better when presented with more data, and some brands' global account managers provide Sprau with monthly reporting showing which Cardinal employees reached out to plan meetings or events. If a meeting organizer didn't go through proper channels, the meetings team will educate him or her on the centralized program. Sprau also will explain to the contracted vendor the benefits of working with her team: standardized contracting, payments and payment time lines.
Established Relationships
Being housed under security, which had built cultural inroads around the world, improved the effectiveness of communications to internal stakeholders and supporters in regions outside of the U.S. and Canada. "The cultural differences in meetings are huge, depending on what region you're in, and the expectations of leadership of those regions are very different," Sprau said. "[Leveraging the meetings team's new alignment with security] allowed us that avenue to go in and work with colleagues in other regions."
Security's knowledge of where groups are traveling and how they're getting there also was beneficial. "That all speaks to the duty of care and safety of employees," Sprau said. Plus, the meetings team can run requested locations past security, empowering the meetings team to say to the internal client, "This might seem like a great idea, but have you thought about X, Y or Z from a security perspective?"
The meetings team also partners more with security onsite, particularly on data protection. Security helps with badging and making sure only registered attendees are accessing sessions. They also sweep the room, clear out proprietary content and monitor for valuables like laptops and phones. Security can make EMTs available in advance if needed and can issue communications onsite about security protocols, including the contact information for the event's security operations center.
Next Steps
The meetings department plans to increase education to internal clients about the centralized program, drive more compliance and increase cost savings. In May, the team rolled out webinars to EMEA. Next up is Asia/Pacific. Latin America is transitioning to the consolidated meetings management vendor and the program will roll out fully to those stakeholders. "The meetings program will have the same objectives as the old one. It will just be a new partner and a little bit different way of working with that partner," Sprau said.
The team also plans to work more closely with the other departments that now fall under the security umbrella, like the environmental health and safety department. The meetings and travel teams will issue joint RFPs when it makes sense.
Then there's the security team itself, of which the meetings team previously knew little. Sprau said, "We've developed a tremendous partnership with the security operations team and revamped the way they look at meetings, and [we] help our clients see the value of security a little bit differently, too."